LAHORE: The Ravi Bachao Tehreek organised its 4th Annual Ravi Yatra on Sunday with an awareness walk from Naseer Bagh to River Ravi.
The organisers said the walk aimed to draw public attention to the ecological collapse of the Ravi River, the rapid loss of Lahore’s green cover, and the growing threats to livelihoods, food systems, and public health along the river.
They said that once the lifeline of Punjab, the Ravi today received untreated sewage, industrial effluents, and solid waste from Lahore. Communities living along the riverbanks — particularly farmers, agricultural workers, and river-dependent families — had been directly exposed to this polluted water. Medical observations and field reports had linked river pollution to serious diseases, including cancer and Hepatitis C, raising grave concerns about public health and environmental injustice, they said.
They feared that in recent years, large-scale real estate and riverfront development projects proposed along the Ravi had intensified ecological damage and social displacement. These projects threatened the conversion of vast stretches of fertile agricultural land, putting millions of acres of productive soil and local food systems at risk. Thousands of villagers, farmers, and river-dependent communities face the possibility of displacement, deeply affecting livelihoods and the already fragile ecological balance of the region, they said.
The activists said that such interventions, combined with the diversion and control of the river’s natural flow, were further weakening an ecosystem that had sustained agriculture, biodiversity, and human settlements for centuries. “The loss of trees, wetlands, and green buffers is accelerating climate vulnerability, air pollution, groundwater depletion, and food insecurity in Lahore,” they said.
They said that the crisis of the Ravi was also rooted in historical water control regimes. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 drastically reduced the natural flow of eastern rivers, including the Ravi, leaving them ecologically weakened and vulnerable to pollution, encroachment, and over-development, they said.
Participants of the Ravi Yatra emphasised the need to revisit and re-examine water-sharing frameworks in the context of climate change, ecological collapse, and the rights of river-dependent communities.
“The Ravi carries our history, memory, and living relationship with water. When a river is polluted, controlled, and reduced to a development corridor, we lose ecology, culture, and the right to a shared future,” said an organiser and member of the Ravi Bachao Tehreek.
Citizens from all walks of life including students, teachers, farmers, lawyers, artists, workers, boatmen, doctors, and environmental activists attended the yatra and walked in solidarity for Ravi, Lahore’s green cover, and for the right to clean water, food, and air.
Published in Dawn, February 2nd, 2026